How Ian McMillan got lost at the Hay Festival

It’s one of the biggest annual gatherings of readers and writers you’ve ever seen, with thousands of people descending on the tiny town of Hay-on-Wye and almost, but not quite, swamping it with novelists and poets and travel writers and people who want to talk about books and people who want to buy books and that means that when you’ve been there for even just a couple of days you start to believe that you are, in fact, living between the covers of a book.

I was recording a couple of editions of my Radio 3 show The Verb and because every bed was taken I was staying with some colleagues in a cottage a few miles out of town high up a single-track road that wound through the hills and fields like a loose tie on a green shirt. One evening my aforementioned colleagues decided to go to listen to a famous versemonger spouting their stanzas (I’m not sure that’s exactly what it said on the poster) and I decided to stroll back to the accommodation and prepare for the next day’s recording.

I admit that, as I set off to walk along the narrow lanes, I looked a little incongruous. I could have been either a very obvious burglar or a baffled tourist looking for his room in an anonymous chain hotel. I was wearing the suit that I had been sporting to record my show; I was dragging a wheeled case that creaked with the weight of books it held. I was wearing a fleece over the suit which was making me sweat buckets but I had no room to stuff my fleece into my case unless I hid some of the books under a hedge.

Also, because I’d been surrounded by books for the weekend I really did believe that I was somehow in a book; I was a man with a mission, or a man in a mystery, or a man wearing too many layers of clothing. I walked along, the wheels of my case moaning and grumbling. I turned left as I’d been instructed to in order to get to the cottage but, between you and me, I took the second left not the first left and after a while I realised that I was lost. Spectacularly lost. There was no signal on my phone so my satnav didn’t work and my bag was getting heavier as I dragged it up the unforgiving hill.

A man saw me passing, popped out of his house and said “Are you lost?” to which I replied “No, I’m in a book.” He smiled and closed the door with the manner of one who’d seen lots of lost people before. I struggled and staggered to the top of the hill. If I really was in a book, then it needed rewriting. I admitted to myself and to the bleating sheep that I didn’t know where I was. I walked back past the same house and the same man opened his door and said: “Are you still in a book?”

“No, I’m lost,” I said, “but I might write a column about it!”